Judith Anderson got me into the theatre, and Judy Garland was my ticket to the movies. My two most important childhood memories were stumbling upon a telecast of Anderson's Medea and being unable to look away, and seeing one of the last theatrical reissues of The Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy left her sepia-toned farmhouse for the Technicolor land of Oz , I was hooked. I read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?six times before I was old enough to see the movie and memorized all of the major Oscar winners before I was out of high school.

I spent my undergraduate and graduate school years developing a love of directing, Aristotle and teaching that I tried to implement in my first two teaching jobs, at the University of the South and the University of South Alabama (and I would not recommend a year in Mobile to anybody with an artistic soul). Then I spent almost a decade writing public relations materials for Turner Broadcasting, where I helped publicize Turner's purchase of MGM and its library and the 50th anniversaries of Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane and Casablanca. The latter led to publishing, with Casablanca: As Time Goes By and Censored Hollywood: Sex, Violence, and Sin in the Movies. After leaving Turner, I started directing and teaching at Georgia State University, first as a part time instructor, then a visiting instructor and now senior lecturer, advisor to students in the BIS program in performance and chair of the program committee for theatre. I have been gifted with opportunities to teach everything from acting to performance theory, which have helped me refine my views of theatre. I've also directed numerous productions here, including Titus Andronicus, set in the modern world of agribusiness; Antigone, set within a U.S. diplomatic family serving in the Middle East; and How I Learned to Drive, which attempted to adhere as closely as possible to the myth of intentionality.

A fascination with the Canadian TV series Twitch City and its creator, Don McKellar, led to a research and production focus on gay Canadian theatre (Mr. McKellar is not gay, which has seriously impacted my social life). As a result, I have directed several plays by Sky Gilbert ("In Which Pier Paolo Pasolini Sees His Death in the Fae of a Boy") and Daniel MacIvor ("See Bob Run") and given solo performances in MacIvor's House and John Herbert's "Writing in the Sand," which I developed from his unpublished memoirs. I also have presented conference papers on Gilbert, MacIvor, Herbert and Tomson Highway. Current projects include expanding "Writing in the Sand" into a full-length piece, researching for a proposed critical history of Herbert's most famous play, Fortune and Men's Eyes, and an ebook for Warner Bros. on the 1959 version of Ben-Hur.

Selected Courses Taught:

Selected Publications:

Leading Couples. New York: The Citadel Press, 2008

"Crafting the Theatre of Hell: The Evolution of John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes, ATHE 2009 Los Angeles